Did Best Buy Sell a Developer Test Version of HP’s TouchPad with Android Pre-Loaded?

Thought that the HP TouchPad is a webOS-only device out of the box? Well, guess again. A user who reportedly walked into a Best Buy store to acquire the HP TouchPad, which is made to run webOS out of the box, discovered that he got a special version with Android 2.2 Froyo instead. In the user-generated and uploaded video on YouTube, you can see that the TouchPad appears new, with the plastic covering still intact, and when the device boots up, it reveals a QulC logo.

The QulC logo is in reference to the Qualcomm Innovation Center. As the TouchPad utilizes a Snapdragon processor, the QulC logo may indicate that the tablet was used or made to be used as a testing device for Qualcomm, and may have been pre-loaded to run Android as a tester at the Qualcomm Innovation Center.

Some readers are already proclaiming the video a big hoax. Whatever the case may be, if you had bought the 16 GB TouchPad for $99 or the 32 GB for $149, and are interested in Android, there’s already an active Android development community looking to port Android Gingerbread to the webOS-powered slate.

What do you mean? It has virtually the same internals as all other tablets but priced below the actual cost of its materials. The only real difference in any of these devices is the UI that skins it.
Maybe your question hints toward your feelings on android. What if it was hacked to run IOS instead?

I have lots of Android devices. What makes the TouchPad special is that it DOESN’T run Android. While I might try putting Ubuntu on it for fun, I wouldn’t create a tablet that is bigger than my Flyer or bulkier than my Galaxy 10.1 – especially when WebOS is actually a nice relief from the mess that Android can be at times.